Word: wiesel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sometimes I think we are more explorers of an unknown continent that we are physicians or scientists," Torsten N. Wiesel, Winthrop Professor of Neurobiology, says quietly. That continent is the brain, and the 22 years of research Wiesel calls only the "first steps" in its exploration have won him and colleague David H. Hubel, Berry Professor of Neurobiology, the 1981 Nobel Prize for Medicine...
...research team since 1959, Hubel and Wiesel have studied the workings of the cerebral cortex's visual region, only a small part of the organ Wiesel terms "the most complicated machine on earth...
...were awarded Nobel Prizes in Medicine. For his pioneering research into the differing functions of the brain's two cerebral hemispheres, Roger Sperry, 68, of the California Institute of Technology, won half of the $181,818 prize. The other half was divided between David Hubel, 55, and Torsten Wiesel, 57, both professors of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, for discovering how images are transferred from the eye's retina to the brain...
Hubel and Wiesel have provided a road map of a small portion of that world. By measuring electrical impulses given off by the neurons of the visual cortex, the researchers discovered that the cells in the cortex are arranged in a regular pattern in columns organized into equally regular "hypercolumns." Each cell within each column, they discovered, has a specific responsibility to perceive and analyze incoming images according to contrast, linear patterns and movement on the retina. Within the columns, the analysis also occurs in a formal sequence. Eventually all this information is relayed to the higher centers...
Later researchers have based much of their work on the theories and techniques devised by Sperry, Hubel and Wiesel, but the workings of the brain remain largely a mystery. Hubel insists the puzzle can be solved. Says he: "We can think differently about the mind now. It is not a mystical thing, but something that can be understood...